*Key & Peele’s Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele have made separate deals this week, with Key joining Eddie Murphy in the Netflix film “Dolemite Is My Name,” and YouTube picking up Peele’s sci-fi anthology series “Weird City.”
Co-created and written by Peele and Key & Peele’s Charlie Sanders, “Weird City” is set in the not-too-distant future metropolis of Weird. Each episode will explore issues that pertain to present-day life in Weird — stories that can only be told through the prism of sci-fi and comedy.
The straight-to-series pickup comes less than a month after Peele and his Monkeypaw Productions inked an overall TV deal with Amazon Studios.
“Writer/creator Charlie Sanders and I collaborated on some Key & Peele sketches that took on everything from the ‘Black Republicans’ to ‘Continental Breakfasts’ to ‘Family Matters,'” Peele said Thursday in a statement. “Now, with YouTube we present a series of comedy driven twisted-ass science fiction stories that take place in a world close to ours but just a little bit off.”
The six-episode effort is expected to debut on YouTube Premium in 2019.
Key, meanwhile, joins Wesley Snipes, Mike Epps, Craig Robinson, Tituss Burgess, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and T.I. opposite star Murphy in Neflix’s biopic of pioneering comedian and blaxploitation film producer Rudy Ray Moore.
Moore used proceeds from his underground comedy records to produce and star in “Dolemite,” a notorious blaxploitation movie featuring a pimp with a harem of kung fu-fighting prostitutes. The film was an underground sensation.
Key will play Jerry Jones, a playwright who is convinced by Moore to write the screenplay for Dolemite.
“Dolemite Is My Name” is already shooting in Los Angeles under director Craig Brewer. It’s due in theaters next year.
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